The secret to becoming an adult is to embrace your inner child

A few months ago, I was in conversation with a client, and he shared that he was scared to ask too many questions in meetings, because he was afraid that people might think he doesn’t know anything, or he doesn’t know how to be an adult. I asked him what that meant, and he shared that as an adult, you are supposed to know what you are doing.

In a recent workshop, one of the participants shared that after realising that her parents are not perfect, she was struggling to find her anchor in the world. She shared she doesn’t know how to be an adult, because growing up, she did not have a decent example of what responsible adults would do.

Recently, I also wrote about how most of us are beating up on ourselves for not knowing how to be adults. I shared that life doesn’t come with an instruction manual, so none of us really know what it means to be an adult. We are all trying to figure it out.

I think Maya Angelou described it best when she said, “I am convinced that most people do not grow up…We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.”

I think she hit the nail on the head. We all carry our childhood selves within us, and we still think and dream like those small children did. We simply don’t share that with others, because we believe that we might be mocked for not being “realistic” or “mature”.  Yet, most of us have no clue how to be adults.

In Elizabeth Benton’s incredible book, Chasing Cupcakes, she talks about how to take responsibility and create the life that you want, and she essentially shares two rules for adulting. The two rules she shares got me thinking about childhood.  

There is so much talk in the coaching world around our inner child and learning to parent your inner child, or acknowledging the feelings of your inner child. Initially, when I started working with my coach, I did not get it. I could not relate to this idea at all, since I grew up fairly quickly. Growing up in my home, you had to. I don’t really have any memories of being a carefree child. I’ve been a “responsible adult” for almost all of my life.

Over time as I worked with my coach, I started to reconnect with that inner child. In my article on detoxing from perfection I shared my process of learning to trust myself more and how it involved reconnecting with my inner child. And what I have learnt over time is that our inner child also holds our deepest inner wisdom.

As my coach would often remind me, small children are closest to Source. They have not been conditioned yet into believing that they are not enough, or thinking that they need to earn their worth. They have not acquiesced yet to fitting a mold and complying with the expectations of others. In fact, in the early stages, they still fight energetically against it. They try to claim and exert their own inner authority. Over time their ability to do that gets eroded and they start following the “rules” of society. In the process of learning to follow the rules, they lose touch with their inner authority.

As adults, we are forever seeking to find our way back to that inner authority; hence all the talk about reconnecting with your inner child. What most of us intuitively know is that there is some innate inner wisdom in our child selves that we wish we had the courage to express.

So, I think I’ve discovered the secret to adulthood. It’s learning to embrace your inner child. And today, I want to invite you to run two experiments in your life. I want to invite you to apply Elizabeth Benton’s two rules and see what happens.

Benton’s first rule says that real transformation doesn’t actually live in some far-off place in the future. Transformation is NOW. It lives in your next decision. If you want to transform your life, you don’t need to make big leaps of faith into the future, you need to make one good decision in this moment.

And our inner child knows that. Small children have no attachment to the past or the future. They simply live in the now, because they KNOW that life is lived in the now, not in the past or the future. Eckhart Tolle said it best when he said that if you think about any experience that you have ever lived through, it was always now when it happened. It was never another time. It was now. When we think about the past, we relive that moment in our minds, but our actual experiences of life always happen in the present moment.

So, the best thing you can do for yourself and your own joy in life, is to commit to being as present as possible in the NOW. Allow yourself to be in the moment as your life unfolds instead of checking out of your life by ruminating over the past or fixating on and worrying about the future.

Benton shares that your past and future have no say in your current decisions. Just because you made certain choices in the past, doesn’t mean you can’t make different ones now. Your past doesn’t define you. It is simply where you started, and a form of self-sabotage is telling yourself that because you behaved a certain way in the past, it determines your current actions. Or even allowing yourself off the hook for poor choices in the past by saying that is simply the way it is. That is not accurate. And you know that.

The same is true for projecting everything into the future. See, if you believe that transformation lives somewhere in the future, then you always put off starting today. You might even feel overwhelmed by the thought of the transformation you are seeking. It might seem too big, too much and then it becomes so easy to put it off until tomorrow. Yet, the truth is that transformation happens through one small decision right now, and then another decision in the next moment, and then another. Transformation is NOW, not in the future. Not one day. Because who knows if one day will come. The future is not guaranteed. The only thing that you can really trust is the present moment, because it is here now.

So, the first rule for adulting then is to fully embrace the now and allow the changes you seek to evolve from the next decision you make in this moment. Small children trust their own innate wisdom. They live fully in the moment, embracing it for what it is, deriving joy and gratitude from the small things in this moment. They trust that they will know how to handle the next moment when it comes and there is so much wisdom in that.

The second rule that Benton shares, is that your best bet is to keep it simple. One of the false beliefs we buy into as adults, is that life is complicated and sometimes we might even derive tremendous pleasure from over-complicating things, since we think it’s a sign of our maturity.

Years ago, when I was studying towards my master’s, my professor used to say true mastery is simplification. When you can explain something that is truly complex in such simple terms that it sounds obvious, you have mastered the content. Simplification is an indication of true understanding.

As an intellectual who loved to complicate things, this idea was so freeing to me at the time. It made so much sense and it had me appreciate those who are able to simplify, clarify, and make things sound obvious or feel smooth and easy. I believed that it took years of work to get to that point of mastery.

Then when I started working with my coach, I discovered that it doesn’t have to take years. See, we tend to ignore the simplest answer to a question, because we believe it can’t be that simple and so often, we step into the trap of overthinking and over-analysing, when the simplest answer would have been to take action.

Benton postulates that that is how we get ourselves stuck and spinning our wheels. We believe we need more information, or we need to know more before we can act. We keep ourselves busy researching, and making plans, never getting into action. And we tell ourselves that we are “working on” the problem. We trick ourselves into the illusion of progress by “efforting”.

We would be better served by asking ourselves whether we are actually getting results for our efforts. My coach often says, “Don’t trust it. Test it.”, and what she means by that is that the only way we can know if something will get us the results we are after, is to test it out; to run the experiment and see.

When you look at small children, that’s exactly how they live. They run experiments every day. They try new things every day and they learn through trial and error. They don’t make mistakes mean anything. They simply see it as one way that it didn’t work and as encouragement to keep trying new experiments until they figure it out.

Before we learned to fear mistakes, we actually understood that that is how we learn. We learn through trial and error. We learn by running experiments; by trying new things, until we solve the problem we are trying to solve.

Small children don’t give up at the first sign of a failed experiment. Imagine if we did that? We would never have learnt to walk, eat, or talk, because it was through trying, through action, through being in experiment with life, through meeting life head-on with action, that we acquired the skills we now have to navigate the world, feed ourselves, and communicate with others.

To take it one step further, sometimes we are afraid of running the experiment or trying something new. We tell ourselves that real change requires drastic action or big leaps of faith and the mere thought of that stops us in our tracks. We feel so overwhelmed that we never try.

A client once shared with me that he was trying to declutter his house. He had read Marie Condo’s book (i.e., he did his research), and he understood that he needed to just throw everything out and get rid of the clutter all at once (because that’s what Condo advises).

I asked him how it was going. He said het hadn’t started. It felt too daunting to throw everything out at once. And he was afraid that he might throw something out that he might need later. So, I suggested he starts with a drawer and just sort out one drawer. He was taken aback by the idea. He said it was too simple and it wasn’t what Marie Condo advised.

I pointed out that clearly her advice wasn’t working for him, because it hadn’t gotten him to declutter his house. It just got him stuck living with his clutter and feeling more and more frustrated. He responded that it sounded too simple to just start with a drawer. I challenged him to start anyway and see what happens.

He ran the experiment and ended up decluttering his whole kitchen in one go. Starting with one simple drawer, opened the door to doing more. It made it feel doable.

One of the things I appreciate most about Steve Chandler, is his approach to doing the doable. He says of success coach Michael Neil that he can support you in doing the impossible. And there are many coaches and authors out there who support people in creating the impossible.

Yet, to do the impossible, one must start with the doable, otherwise you will never start. The road to living a life that feels bigger than your current life – and that might even feel impossible right now – is to do the doable today. Start with the smallest unit of action you can think of to put you on the path towards where you want to go.

Benton shares that if I were to remove one grain of rice from a pile of rice and put it on the other side of the table, that one grain of rice won’t constitute a pile, but if I consistently keep removing one grain of rice from the pile and putting it with the other grains I’ve already removed, I will eventually reach a tipping point when I would be able to say that ONE grain of rice made the difference and turned a few grains of rice into a pile of rice. So it is with small steps taken consistently over time.

James Clear says it best when he says, “Most big, deeply satisfying accomplishments in life take at least five years to achieve. This can include building a business, cultivating a loving relationship, writing a book, getting in the best shape of your life, raising a family, and more.

Five years is a long time. It is much slower than most of us would like. If you accept the reality of slow progress, you have every reason to take action today. If you resist the reality of slow progress, five years from now you’ll simply be five years older and still looking for a shortcut.”

Add to that what Robert Maurer shares in his book, The Kaizen Way, that we don’t know when we start which decisions will be small ones and which ones will be big ones, and we start to realise that we don’t really control the outcome. We only control our choice in the moment and the action we take towards what we want to create.

A baby learning to walk keeps working at taking that first step and we can never tell when those wobbly steps will finally turn into a solid and clear step that marks the beginning of real walking. And yet, it happens every time, right in front of our eyes even though we can never truly pinpoint the moment of transition from learning to walk to actually walking with confidence.

 We tend to think that change happens through big, bold actions and leaps of faith and that for us to create something new, we need to innovate. That is not entirely accurate. Most of the time true transformation happens through small steps that might seem inconsequential, but that add up over time, and before we know it, we have transformed our lives. Transformation is not revolutionary, it’s evolutionary.

Conclusion

There you have it. Two simple, yet profound rules for becoming an adult. Live in the now and keep it simple. It seems our inner child was onto something after all.

And if you were wondering what I told the client who said he was afraid to ask too many questions in meetings, I encouraged him to embrace his inner child and to allow himself to be curious. I pointed out that we always learn something when we stay curious.

And he is someone who understands the value of action, so he ran the experiment. He asked all his burning questions, and everyone learned something new that day. He has discovered the immeasurable value of childlike curiosity and how it serves him.

I will leave you with this final quote by Madeleine L’Engle:

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide…

Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

References:

1. Benton, E. (2019). Chasing Cupcakes: How one broke, fat girl transformed her life (and how you can, too). Primal Potential.
2. Breytenbach, C. (2021). Perfection Detox: Learning to trust yourself. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/pefection_detox_learning_to_trust_yourself/
3. Breytenbach, C. (2022). On adulting and taking responsibility. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/on_adulting_and_taking_responsibility/
4. Maurer, R. (2014). One small step can change your life: The Kaizen Way. New York: Workman.off